Reviews & Interviews

Flora Qian’s South of the Yangtze

by Stuart Christie, Executive Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University

Reading South of the Yangtze by Qian Gu (Winner, Proverse Prize 2022) feels like returning to the family hearth in your home village, taking a familiar seat next to a warm fire in deep winter as the storyteller drinks her tea, leans back, and begins to weave a tale which will likely last deep into the evening.

The weather is poor outside. There should be little venturing forth in between times, and the village storyteller (you’ve heard) is good. She possesses a reputable background—hers is one of the leading families—and is widely travelled, which makes her seem faintly exotic to her fellow locals. The host has left the front door unlocked since others may still be willing to brave the weather for a walk across the village to hear a good story. The host places another block of charcoal on the brazier and adjusts the flue so the smoke won’t get too thick or noxious indoors. He settles in and recharges the storyteller’s tea.

She sips, clears her throat, and begins.
*
A work of fiction, South of the Yangtze sustains an autobiographical purpose: “The love I have for today nonetheless contains the love I had for the past”. As with all coming of age stories, there are hard and very early-won truths: “As six-year-olds, we had learned not to take adults’ words at face value” including the brutality with which small children judge one another—the narrator calls her playmate, Weiwei, “the stupid, jealous daughter of trashy parents and granddaughter of a convict’s concubine”—little comprehending that adult life will make them liable to the same slander as a regular feature of human experience. And, just as often (as all good literature does), Qian’s novel imparts wisdom the reader may profit by:

The [false] dichotomy of family versus others, and friends versus enemies had been passed down to us from an older generation very easily, and was very hard to shake off or sometimes even notice later in life.

In terms of form, South of the Yangtze is arranged structurally into tiered, retrospective narrative frames—of the protagonist’s (Yinan’s) often lonely childhood growing up in the 1980s intermittently juxtaposed with contemporary experiences upon her return to her hometown, Jiangnan—greater Shanghai—as a grown woman making intermittent visits to Hong Kong. These frames interact, achieving an overall stylistic and dynamic effect.

Such narrative layering allows the fulness, and contingency, of specific moments to pass elegantly in the novel as life events invite Yinan, older now, to reflect upon her movements, passions, and commitments to place, nation, and language. Qian has the good writer’s commitment to the moment—a childhood’s memory of her first pomegranate on the train, “every red seed, one by one” and of learning how to swim so she could play and dive for winkles in her aunt and uncle’s hometown. Her attention to the depiction of sensory detail (tastes, sights, sounds, hard to describe feelings) conveys space and place expertly, much better than rootless, abstract description ever could. In one remarkable passage, Yinan recovers calm in an act of perceptive focus:

Over time, the thing I found most helpful for my eyesight was watching the clouds outside the window. From my desk at school, I often saw a light gathering of white clouds against the sky on fair days, floating and parting with the wind, always changing shape and taking new forms. Clouds seemed never to need a boundary of the “self.” And it amazed me how serenely they embraced each other, obtaining and losing at the same time, and became a new cloud with each encounter. I could watch the clouds for a long time until I heard the piercing bell at the end of those classes.

Qian’s commitment to emotions recollected in tranquility—joining the absences and hustle of Shanghai present to the forever-departed memories of Jiangnan past—puts her in fine poetic (Romantic) company without ever feeling derivative: “The love I have for today nonetheless contains the love I had for the past”. Such longing is certainly sufficient for this reader to feel, yet how much more is South of the Yangtze than this!

The absence of nostalgia in this first autobiographical novel is bracing. Qian’s intention prefers crystalline, clear-eyed depiction to bathos which, over time, would become tedious. Rather, the protagonist recalls how altered environments beg palimpsest; that is, how the sumptuous façades of the hastily assembled present mask “reduced and forgotten” blocks and corners which, for their time, had their own (now displaced) presence and value. Shifting layers—of different places, street names, and conflicting perspectives—release a converging, tectonic historical narrative energy released by: the wartime Japanese occupation, Darroch Road, in English, returning to the sounds of local Shanghai dialect or putonghua. The Duolun quarter of the protagonist’s youth (Yinan lives in a “cramped, third floor apartment” with her parents and grandparents) subsequently industrialized, situates a vital and persisting multilingualism as the bedrock to always uneven, yet also rich and varied, historical experiences as several generations of the Qian family pass.

Throughout Qian conveys the gritty realism of lived experience unflinchingly: hand-washed laundry, rotting teeth, cramped communal living, spittoons serving as bedpans, quick and chilly bathing on a small semi-private balcony, the transition from coal to liquefied gas for family cooking, the arrival of consumerism and the internet. And always, there is the sense (as the young uniquely experience it) of precariousness, of family fortunes being subject to uncontrollable and irresistible forces of history, violence, and transformation: “instead of facing history head-on, to understand [complex historical forces and processes] in terms of scapegoats”. Disruptive history blows through the house suddenly like the cold north wind. And, irrevocably, it leaves a record of its passing—broken, refreshed, shattered, restored objects, memories, and lives—for a child, now grown woman, to recollect and reassemble for the reader.

There is also gripping and sincere love of the great tradition of the Chinese classics, as Yinan grows intellectually and sufficiently wise—even as a middle-school, then university, student—to sound the depths of Hong Lou Meng [紅樓夢」or the Journey to the West. (Like most of us, she prefers Lin Daiyu to Xue Baochai.) Like educated Chinese of all classes, Yinan reads her contemporary coming of age via the prism of countless generations of distilled wisdom conveyed by Chinese literary traditions; and, in one touching moment inspires her classmate, Jie, to begin reading the “Dream of the Red Chamber” as the latter prepares to depart Shanghai. (Again the power of the canon intervenes: the unknown future both girls, soon women, must face lies beyond the edge of the known world the Monkey King must traverse; nothing truly lies beyond the “five-fingered mountain” of the Buddha’s hand. Yet foolish, desiring beings continue to seek the nothing that lies beyond.) So the emergence of a shared affection goes, and always has, as the best and brightest among contemporary China’s youth face the demands of a complex and uncertain present by leveraging the joys, passions, and experiences of the long and rich literary tradition that has preceded, and is certain to succeed, them. Life brings the two young readers together and, eventually, apart as each begins to take measure of her proper duties and obligations as adults. Each must learn to depart from one another’s lives as decisively as each entered. Only a thoughtless sentiment, a nostalgia remains as the traces of the momentum driving girls toward womanhood that must over time divide them.

So, too, the author’s frank treatment of the uses, translations and potentials of her other mastered language apart from Shanghainese and putonghua, English, becomes ideally suited to her overseas identity and experience (“uprooted and much more visibly metamorphic”) once offshore. (Like so very many of her generation in Shanghai, Qian will emigrate to pursue graduate school.) Over time, the narrator acquires newer aspects of linguistic being and becoming: “The language that frustrates in certain aspects also frees in others”. Qian channels the power and belonging of a vernacular culture, and its generational transmission powerfully:

My grandparents enjoyed watching Yue opera on their back-and-white television. [. . .] Yue opera was very similar to the dialect they had spoken in Zhuji (諸暨). So before I could read the subtitles, I could rely upon my grandparents to interpret the singing.

One of my favorite moments in the novel is occasioned by three generations of Qians gathering to retell and quibble over the story of the struggle between the Wu and Yue emperors, “The Legend of Shi Xi”.

The grandparents relate the tale to the young protagonist, and the otherwise aloof father, overhearing, strolls in and adds his piece. Upon a moment, the effect delicately achieves the layering of historicity and viewpoint which not only conveys tradition but also achieves family and community. This also breeds soft-core racism and ignorance, as when second-hand clothes gifted from a relative in the US prompts queries about foreigners’ smells and might the garments infect their Chinese wearers with AIDS? (A university student, Yinan eventually broadens her intercultural outlook by braving the potentials, and perils, of the The Hard Rock café and its foreign clientele.) The distortions of emic understandings in which South of the Yangtze traffics is, at least partly and to an acknowledged extent, guaranteed by fear of the unknown, of those etic values lying beyond the pale of local understandings.

Over time, the young narrator’s challenges only increase as she (a professor’s daughter) slowly, and only in fits and starts, acquires family history sufficient to chart her parents’ and grandparents’ perilous navigation of the sometimes treacherous floes of modern Chinese history. (Every Chinese family has their own version of this same story.) Yinan’s dawning grasp of China’s great transformation also involves acknowledgement how periods of ill-considered candor (such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign [百花齐放]) were followed, predictably, by further crackdown on dissent of the anti-rightist campaigns (反右運動) that ensnared, alternately, so many youthful idealists and former landowners including the narrator’s great-grandfather who was sent to a labor camp and whose son was killed during the tumult of the Great Leap Forward. These are hard truths indeed, but all too familiar for those whose family ties and love of China compelled them to stay and to survive through these uniquely powerful historical times rather than fleeing. So the steel of a great nation has been tempered in times of almost unthinkable adversity.

Yinan’s learned father begins to educate his daughter with greater attention to the tradition of Confucian moral philosophy. He can only begin once she recognizes the different uses of morally upright speech to manipulate, to distort or to control. She acquires an interest in English, then greater subtlety and boundary awareness. Her mother’s sensibility (being a former student-cadre) lovingly represents that great ballast in latter Chinese 20th century popular thought: Maoism and its axioms cited from the “Little Red Book”. In extracting value from her parents’ contrastive world views, Yinan acquires balance acquired from both and a greater baseline wisdom acquired against the more ephemeral backdrop of Hong Kong TV dramas, popular in the 1990s, watched with her aging grandmother in the sitting room of their family flat. There is peacefulness, bathos, and a humorous acceptance in her resulting realization: “I realized that my family had not been adventurous people for generations, at least for a thousand years. [. . .] for all I knew, over the past thousand years, our family line had remained in the former Wuyue territory. [. . .] Was this the reason my grandfather had decided against accepting a position in Taiwan in 1949?”

Expressed so directly, this logical chain becomes compelling and recognizable for those who have had the great privilege to teach bright young Chinese minds. The young protagonist shifts expertly from the calculus of place to the calculus of loyalty and integrates the two in one shared equation. Yinan’s commitment to place over time resolves into achieved resolution of self-understanding grounding other levels: of outlook, of values, of priorities. We are who we are where we are. Why should one (the protagonist reasonably asks) choose exile over the emplacements of so many long-standing millennia?

Yinan teaches her would-be boyfriend, the fluent Taiwanese-American, Simon, how to write Chinese and hence to understand his Chinese self better. (This is a good reminder in the novel of the unevenness of diasporic Chinese experience throughout the globe.) Another interesting moment occurs when the family matriarch rejects the very premise of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) as “nothing compared to traditional Shanghainese steamed chicken or delicate drunken chicken cooked in wine”. (Certainly the Qian family matriarch is right.) Or again, in recounting the story of Lady Mengjian, the foreign, unlettered reader enjoys the permeation of classical history, made accessible in English, and learns and listens right alongside the young protagonist. A young woman by now, Yinan eventually uses the internet to communicate with Simon in Hong Kong as well as her father on faculty exchange in Germany. How inter-connected the world now seems! She travels to Hong Kong, finds that the self-absorbed Simon has drifted away, and so loses another anchorage on a possible future following her graduation from university. She plans for graduate school in the US.

With Simon dead and Jie lost to her for the time being, Yinan faces the future resolutely but bleakly. One of the more stunning lines in the novel achieves poetry: “How I had wished to see the stars shining in their time, instead of the ghostly illusion they brought to earth after light years of traveling”. Qian’s romantic sensibility waxes at its fullest here, as all unrequited love must, ennobled through suffering and loss. Pregnant, Jie returns to Yinan’s life and both recapture their girlhood affection for one another. The novel closes with peacefulness, self-understanding and gentle expectation on American soil. Yinan mourns Simon, yet also frees herself from grief at his graveside “now that the same aching feelings of parting no longer contain me”.

The author’s sensitivity—and resulting thoughtfulness—is hardly surprising, at times even piercing, in its veracity: “Even as a young child, I had a rudimentary sense of equality, which is achieved in our society not really by the fairness of the game rules, but by the absence of class security”. This is profoundly true: precarity creates (temporary) alliances in kinship and struggle, for Chinese people of all classes, which has the effect not of heedless, or reckless, individual loyalties but of profound regard for a universally afflicting fortune. None are exempt from fortune, all are susceptible to it—whether high or low, good or bad. It follows that throwing in with one’s neighbour during difficult times, as long as one reasonably can, is the best evidence of a shared Chinese humanity.

The book is also daring, even brave, in fictionalizing themes such as political history and abusive teacher-student interactions which have remained controversial into the present. South of the Yangtze presents plainly how the power dynamics informing unequally gendered, sexual, and status differences (here between older teachers and younger students in positions of greater vulnerability) must be of great significance to any society. Questions of inappropriate conduct, sexual violence, and institutional responses to these pertain in the reading as touchstones to be considered, judged, and acted upon by the dispassionate. Yinan and Jie struggle with their own agency, their search for appreciation as complex beings against the backdrop of two-dimensional censoriousness imposed by prevailing norms: “who wants to live in victimhood? We live in a world where victims are not seen as complex beings.”

Nor, certainly, should young women (or men) ever be harassed or victimized. Rather, the enforcement of normativity risks reducing characterization (here fictionalized) to a flatness which is not real, as the binaries of “victim” and “perpetrator” assume sensational outlines in more popular, less nuanced understandings. In the final analysis, quality literature such as Qian’s South of the Yangtze adopts a courageous stance. Simply and elegantly, it undertakes the telling of the truth and the argument truth makes best: that abstinence or avoidance in approach to controversial topics is neither the most therapeutic nor beneficial approach to the righting of wrongs. Instead, encouraging healthy debate about how to create and sustain safer spaces, in respect of dignity and difference for all, is the key function for art at the present time. (And perhaps for all time). Of art, like the people, Qian cites a proverb: “The tree grows taller, and the branches grow further.”

In conclusion, the objective reader of Qian’s work must weigh the uses of its truthful depictions—its veracity, its unseemliness, its potential to stir up uncomfortable truths—against the perils of omitting mention of the truth altogether. Any quest for truth necessarily risks provoking readerly squeamishness. The author’s self-appointed duty, rather, is to reveal uncomfortable aspects of human development and interaction; and, even, to clarify their significance while not supporting them as such. And these uncomfortable truths must be weighed alongside the collective impulse to censor unpopular or uncomfortable topics in the fiction simply because they are unpopular and uncomfortable. It is seldom the discomfiting fiction that deserves opprobrium exclusively; but, equally, the predictable and often uninterrogated lapse into censure on the part of the shocked reader.

Qian is to be given credit for daring to craft an unflinching fiction which the reader may not only savor in its safer moments but may also be troubled and even shocked by. As her beautiful protagonist learns, having lost her innocence irrevocably, “the most humiliation and the most heightened longing all at once” represent the human condition informing the adult life. Irrevocably, Yinan has grown up. And she learns, as any grown woman does, that she is not alone: “[The relationship with her teacher] was not fair from the beginning, I thought, not fair at all. And he was not really that original, either”. Yinan’s development hinges upon sharing the story with Jie and, eventually, all of us. Hence Qian’s novel arrives to importance and significance as her protagonist acquires the mastery and self-discipline adulthood requires.
*
The tale now told, late evening has stretched into cold night. The storyteller drains the long, final draught of cold tea, clears her throat, and nods absent-mindedly in the direction of the now-slumbering host. He has forgotten to stir the brazier. The cold air has come down the flue and pushed the smoke into the sitting room. Any guests remaining have forgotten their present surroundings with watery eyes—it must be the smoke—lulled by the words, the unfurling of the tale. One by one, or in pairs, the village guests get up and leave the house quietly. Each communes inwardly with his or her own thoughts, with the particular and long-forgotten memories Yinan’s story has provoked. The storyteller is the last to leave, smiling wearily at the snoring host.

He will wake up, cold and shivering, uttering an oath in the eerie middle of the early morning. He will wonder why he has been so foolish as to be lulled into sleep by the truthful power of the tale—a story of common themes extraordinarily told, one that reminded him of the man he used to be right before he dozed off. He will relight the fire, turn the kettle on, and warm his hands. He rearranges the chairs in his sitting room and promises himself to invite the storyteller back when next she is through the village. But who knows when that will be?

Formatting note: I found the volume’s efforts to accommodate the author’s translanguaging (in the move from Chinese colloquial usages into English) both important and credible. The English narrative insets original Chinese language references using both characters and pinyin. I did, however, find the use of quotation marks enclosing Chinese characters odd and jarring.


Interview:
Language and Identity: Good Communicator!“, Around DB, December 2023

Introduction to the novel and reading:

Flora Qian introduces “South of the Yangtze” at the Proverse Autumn Reception 2023 – YouTube

Flora Qian reads from her first novel, “South of the Yangtze” (Proverse, Autumn 2023) – YouTube

Photo from the book launch at Helena May, Hong Kong, 21 November 2023